A first for the region: Gay marriage legal in South Africa

Africa is known as the home of some of the most ugly, homophobic attitudes in the world. A few years ago, for example, Zimbabwe‘s strongman leader, President Robert Mugabe, demonized homosexuals. He declared them to be “worse than pigs and dogs.” (BBC)

Now, South Africa‘s post-apartheid national legislature has taken a historic step forward for human rights on a vast continent that has seen its unfortunate share of racism, tribal prejudices and human-rights abuses.

Soweto, late September: Young gay men and lesbians find companionship and a safe haven at a “shebeen” (bar-social club) in a township that is normally hostile toward them

Yesterday, with strong backing from the ruling African National Congress political party, the lower house of South Africa’s parliament passed the controversial Civil Union Bill. Last year, South Africa’s highest court had given the government until December 1 of this year “to legalize same-sex weddings…after gay-rights activists took the issue to court.” The high court had ruled that “existing laws discriminated against homosexuals.” That decision “was based on [South Africa's] constitution, which was the first in the world specifically to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of sexual preference [sic].” (BBC)

As the Civil Union Bill was being worked out, some gay-rights activists saw it as providing for “a kind of sexual apartheid, with the government establishing a ‘separate-but-equal’ format,” so the proposed legislation was amended. As a result, with its passage, “[w]hile it is still impossible for same-sex couples to marry under the Marriage Act, it’s now possible for any citizen to get married under the [more expansive] Civil Union one. Furthermore, under the latter, parties, homosexual or heterosexual, may opt to call their contract a marriage or a civil union. Whatever the nomenclature, the rights and duties attached to either marriage or civil union are identical.” (Business Day, South Africa)

Lesbians took part in a Gay Pride parade in Soweto on September 23, 2006

The newly passed bill must also be approved – it is expected to pass there, too – by the parliament’s upper house.

Kenneth Meshoe, the head of the African Christian Democratic Party (motto: “For a Bible-based South Africa”), said: “Adultery, sexual immorality and homosexuality are grave sins in God’s sight….With this bill, the ruling party and all those who support it are inviting serious trouble on themselves without even considering the impact [it] will have on future generations.” (Independent Online)

On a South African beach in 1989, a sign of uglier, undemocratic times (swimming for “the white race group” only): Are the gay-marriage bill’s opponents encouraging a new kind of apartheid?

Parliament member and former head of the Pan-Africanist Congress party Motsoko Pheko remarked: “Which country in Africa will accept leadership from a country that suffers Eurocentric eccentricity? Only those who have sold their souls to cultural imperialism will support this obscenity.” (Independent Online)

A spokesman for the Catholic Church in South Africa said his institution “does not make provision for anything other than a marriage between a man woman and even then, only under strict conditions.” (Daily News/Independent Online)

Notes a news analyst for Business Day: “It is not that same-sex marriage will ‘seriously divide our society.’ It’s that our culture – like any, though perhaps in a more extreme form – is inevitably divided. The same-sex marriage debate reminds us that any culture is a matter of controversy, and that politics in a democracy is an attempt to rationally and equitably settle such controversies.” The writer adds that South Africa’s government “has shown that, despite loud and emotional opposition from within its own ranks, it will remain faithful to the constitution.”

Writing in the Mail & Guardian, commentator Jean Meiring, an associate of Cambridge University’s law faculty, noted shortly before yesterday’s vote: “[I]n a secular democracy such as ours, it’s not the representatives of organized religion who should have the casting vote in this debate. Their own freedoms…are protected by our constitution. They have no place denying gay South Africans the right to equality and dignity promised in the constitution….[T]hat’s…what it’s all about, plain and simple: the equality of all human beings, and the right we all have to be treated with dignity.” Meiring offered a chilling reminder: “[W]e didn’t uproot apartheid [only] to plant another tree of inequality in its stead….I can already picture the park benches, sprayed with a twist on that hoary old prohibition: ‘Straights only.’”